The Macabre and the Unusual

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Conan and The Giant Sloth

I got the call Thursday, the 21st of January from NBC. “We need a full size Dinosaur Skeleton and we need it tomorrow.”

Conan had been doing sketches all week supposedly designed to cost the studio big cash as a comic form of revenge for his abruptly ended contract. He had previously claimed to “buy” an exotic sports car and a race horse. I’m glad to know that for his ultimate revenge he wanted a dinosaur. I know ever since I was 5 I wanted a revenge dinosaur. There’s a saying in my house, “revenge is a dish best served dinosaur”

The thing is, Dinosaurs are huge. We all know that, right, but we lose perspective on how big they are when we see them in a museum. I run a 5,000 square foot warehouse and an adult T-Rex is longer then my building and taller then my ceiling. And while the average millionaire has sports cars and horses to spare, unless you’re Nicholas Cage, you just don’t HAVE Dinosaurs laying around. I had a few smaller dinosaurs ready to go, including an 11 foot long Dimetrodon, but everyone knows Dimetrodon can’t hold the hose to spray the picasso with caviar. So that was out.

The wrong way to display fossils.

The right way to disply fossils

I was able to set aside a giant ground sloth that was about to be installed in a museum, but he had the weekend free. It was a rental, not a purchase, from a prop shop, not the Smithsonian, and cost nowhere near the $65 million dollars they said on the air. The bones are not real, but they are a museum quality reconstruction. The skeleton we used now stands in some solemn museum hall somewhere, curators and patrons blissfully unaware of Mr. Sloth’s wild weekend.

He partied with all the audience and crew, and I’m proud to say may go down in history as the most monumentally absurd set piece ever used in a comedy sketch. We here at Dapper Cadaver are proud we got to contribute to such an epic episode.